Lawyer Sidney Powell pleaded guilty to reduced charges in Atlanta Thursday over efforts to overturn Donald Trump's loss in the 2020 election in Georgia, becoming the second defendant in the sprawling case to reach a deal with prosecutors.

Powell, who was charged alongside Trump and 17 others with violating the state's anti-racketeering law, entered the plea just a day before jury selection was set to start in her trial. She pleaded guilty to six misdemeanours related to intentionally interfering with the performance of election duties.

As part of the deal, she will serve six years of probation, will be fined $6,000 and will have to write an apology letter to Georgia and its residents. She also agreed to testify truthfully against her co-defendants at future trials.

Powell, 68, was initially charged with racketeering and six other counts as part of a wide-ranging scheme to keep the Republican U.S. president in power after he lost the 2020 election to Democrat Joe Biden. Prosecutors say she also participated in an unauthorized breach of elections equipment in a rural Georgia county elections office.

 

The acceptance of a plea deal is a remarkable about-face for a lawyer who, perhaps more than anyone else, strenuously pushed baseless conspiracy theories about a stolen election in the face of extensive evidence to the contrary.

If prosecutors compel her to testify, she could provide insight on a news conference she participated in on behalf of Trump and his campaign shortly after the election and on a White House meeting she attended in mid-December of that year during which strategies and theories to influence the outcome of the election were discussed.

Barry Coburn, a Washington-based lawyer for Powell, declined to comment on Thursday.

Steve Sadow, the lead attorney for Trump in the Georgia case, expressed confidence after Powell's plea.

"Assuming truthful testimony in the Fulton County case, it will be favourable to my overall defence strategy," he said, without elaborating.

Tampering with election equipment

Powell was scheduled to go on trial on Monday with lawyer Kenneth Chesebro after each filed a demand for a speedy trial. Jury selection was set to start Friday. 

A lower-profile defendant in the case, bail bondsman Scott Graham Hall, last month pleaded guilty to five misdemeanour charges. He was sentenced to five years of probation and agreed to testify in further proceedings.

This Jan. 7, 2021, image taken from Coffee County, Ga., security video, appears to show Cathy Latham, county Republican chair, centre, introducing members of a computer forensic team to local election officials. The forensics team arrived to make copies of voting equipment in an effort arranged by Powell. (Coffee County/The Associated Press)

Prosecutors allege that Powell conspired with Hall and others to access election equipment without authorization and hired computer forensics firm SullivanStrickler to send a team to Coffee County, in south Georgia, to copy software and data from voting machines and computers there.

The indictment says a person who is not named sent an email to a top SullivanStrickler executive and instructed him to send all data copied from Dominion Voting Systems equipment in Coffee County to an unidentified lawyer associated with Powell and the Trump campaign.

At public appearances in the election aftermath, Powell falsely claimed that votes cast on Dominion machines were flipped from Trump to Biden, that a server containing votes was found in Europe, and that the software used by Dominion and Smartmatic, another voting technology company, was created in Venezuela at the direction of the late autocrat Hugo Chavez to make sure he never lost an election.

Smartmatic and Dominion, which was founded several years ago in Toronto, have filed defamation suits against several individuals related to public statements after the 2020 vote, including Powell and former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani.

Powell and Giuliani were among the lawyers behind the cases claiming a conspiracy by Democrats, despite Republican state leaders, and Trump's own attorney general and other administration officials, publicly stating there was no major election fraud. Dozens of challenges to election results across the U.S. by Trump advocates were tossed by the courts.

     A video of a deposition by Powell is shown on July 12, 2022, during a hearing held by a House of Representatives committee investigating the aftermath of the 2020 election and the subsequent riot at the U.S. Capitol. (Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)

Some of those suits have been deemed frivolous. A federal appeals court judge ruling earlier this year that Powell and five other lawyers are to pay $152,000 US in sanctions for election fraud suits filed in Michigan.

After Powell threatened to "blow up" Georgia with a "biblical" court filing, the Trump legal team distanced itself from her, saying she was not working on their behalf. She later made the comment on how she would release "the Kraken," an apparent reference to the film Clash of the Titans, in which Zeus gives the order to release the mythical sea monster.